128 karma · joined December 21, 2012
As for evil maid, yes, it does help: You can't just change keys if you have a UEFI password. Sure, a determined attacker could externally reprogram your SPI flash. But that is a lot more effort. Absolute security doesn't exist, but you can make it as hard as possible :).
Another use case is actually dual booting with Windows: You can add Microsoft's cert to the DB and only the DB. This way, Windows can not add any new certs. And you can only load bootloaders signed by Microsoft (no shim etc, as MS was clever enough to use a different key for that). That way, Windows could only compromise your Linux if Microsoft signs a malicious Linux kernel. I would hope they have their key on an HSM and don't sign everything lightly ;).
For example, on a flight, I can look at the bug tracker (since it's part of the clone), pick a bug I want to work on, create a few commits to fix it, then update that bug (set it to closed, reference the commits that fixed it), and then upload it all when the plane landed again.
It's quite sad to see that so few projects use it. The idea of having everything in one repo, incl. bugs, is just great. I can create new bugs while offline, update bugs while offline, etc. and then just sync everything once I'm back online.
It also has pretty good support for incrementally importing from and exporting to Git: https://blog.nil.im/?79
Alternatively, if you want to avoid OpenWrt, there's also ObjFW on bare-metal ARM: https://heap.zone/blog/?68
I offer both, self-hosted and on GitHub, because I believe in decentralization. It's Git after all! :)
Yup, I was the guy who pushed an app using ObjFW to the store: https://webkeks.org/blog/?74
Actually, I don't get all this "Messaging is slow". In the ObjFW runtime, it's just 12 instructions for x86_64. That's barely noticable. I even used ObjC in an HPC application and compared it to the C version, just for fun. There was no measurable difference in performance.
What's more important in the average application is that the foundation classes are fast. For example, C#'s and Cocoa's dictionaries are really slow (but I don't know why). While C# and Cocoa both need 1.2 sec to insert 1 Mio objects into a dictionary and retrieve them, ObjFW only needs 0.3.